This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

This came right after Conservative MPs came to grief for asking the worst outposts of U.S. journalism — including Fox News — to let them tell Americans that Canada is bad and Trudeau is deplorable for having settled the Omar Khadr case. (Khadr was the Canadian teenage boy tortured by the U.S.)

The MPs did this as Canada prepared to enter NAFTA negotiations with an emotionally fragile president with a temper like Semtex. Trade is precious to Canada. It means jobs.

Article Continued Below

But Conservative politicians apparently wouldn’t mind a job catastrophe if it served their purposes. So they tried to blacken Canada’s name on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, Facebook and Fox, which they know Trump watches feverishly.

This didn’t go over terribly well. There’s a time and a place, as most reasonable Canadians would say.

And then Trudeau appeared in Rolling Stone. Stung by criticism for the earlier venture, Conservatives said his very photo — white-shirted and unsmiling in his office — would endanger NAFTA talks.

This isn’t just hypocritical, it’s surprisingly clueless about journalism’s mechanics.

“Why does (Trudeau) need to do this right now, when it does put in danger the direction and the commencement of these negotiations?” Conservative MP Lisa Raitt said defensively.

Asked how Trudeau could have known that the article would be anti-Trump, Raitt said: “They would have known that there’s going to be comparisons drawn.”

In other words, she just insulted Trump herself. Raitt thinks he’s a numpty too.

Trudeau didn’t know what the article would look like, when it would run, or that he would make the cover, which he wouldn’t have wanted anyway. It may have been commissioned long before Canada began to look like a golden kingdom to increasingly desperate Democrats.

“The Cover of the Rolling Stone” is an older boomer joke from a 1970s novelty song by, seriously, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. How lame. Trudeau perhaps thought Rolling Stone would reassure older Americans of Canadian friendship, which is all to the good.

By the way, you don’t ask journalists for coverage, they ask you. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer doesn’t know this. He asked the Toronto Star op-ed page to run his leaden opinion piece on the Khadr settlement, and it kindly did so.

Scheer could not bring himself to refer to “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,” not once. Even accepting the fact of Trudeau’s election seemed to pain him. As for his persuasiveness, I won’t say what I call writing this dreary (OK, I will. “The Damp Hand.”)

Americans famously don’t know much about other countries, never having felt the need. Rolling Stone’s “Justin Trudeau: Why Can’t He Be Our President?” was a primer on a country they might wish to know better very soon. You know, courtesy, health care, functioning schools, all the clichés.

In the interview, Trudeau was polite in the extreme, and did not criticize Trump or Americans or their government. Why would he?

One thing did interest me: the story had typos, made jokes that Canadians didn’t get (Trump’s “flaxen head of hair is not strange,” said CTV earnestly), and got proper names wrong, like the Royal Canadian “Mountain” Police and the “Liberty” party rather than “Liberal.” Apparently Rolling Stone is as short of copy editors as everyone else.

Americans aren’t good at foreign facts. So used to being “leader of the free world” — an absurd phrase to begin with — and then stunned to lose the title so quickly, they are suddenly taking an interest in the big Out There. This includes Canada, which has health care and plausible leadership, apparently.

Non-America is vastly different, they find. As the Onion once put it, “Perky ‘Canada’ Has Own Government, Laws,” noting that Canadians have access to new inventions like “refrigerated food, zippers and printing.”

On July 21, the New York Times improved on this, writing, “In addition to a plethora of land, Canada has many libraries with extensive literary collections.” Oooh. Canada resembles America in notable ways.

But, thankfully, not in all ways: Americans fight wars with non-America — Vietnam, Iraq — and withdraw knowing as little about the place as when they invaded.

Here’s a sadder version of this. In a July 24 column, I had Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara quoting T.S. Eliot in the Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War — it can be seen on freedocumentaries.org — on the hideous killing that filled McNamara’s career. It was the central quote of his working life.

I was astounded when a reader pointed out to me that McNamara had the quote wrong. It should have read, “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

Imagine not getting the quote right, not to mention failing to absorb its lesson. Consider the misunderstandings: America and Vietnam; America and Iraq; Conservatives and Liberals; Conservatives and patriotism; Trump and all that surrounds him. Will we ever make our way out of this thicket?

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com